Yup. That's more or less what's happening or Oracle right now. They'll profitability soldier on for a while due to the massive amount of legacy servers running Oracle databases at companies all over the world. But, every $BIG_CORP out there has on their roadmap a long-term plan to either drastically reduce their spend on Oracle products, or more often, eliminate it entirely.
You can believe this if you want. But $BIGCORP does not have the same license agreements that you and I see. There is a lot of momentum to stay on Oracle and companies have had decades to migrate away. Some have, most haven't and I think not much is going to change in the next decade.
[] I'm literally telling a coworker we can't do what she wants to do with a Oracle DB server because the license doesn't allow it. Then I get an email from a VP that states we have a special license that does specifically allow it. I'm left wondering how many other companies have special licenses.
And every one I’ve heard of considers Oracle a predatory vendor and they want to stop using them.
They do things like charging you per CPU to run Java and even though you only run it on four CPUs you theoretically could run it on your entire VMWare cluster so they charge you for 10,000 CPUs. Which is ridiculous so they’ll give you a unique license for their software and they’ll bundle it all together so it isn’t a la carte anymore so even if you stop using 40% of their software you pay the same amount.
Oracle’s business model seems to me to be to extract every nickel from their customers until they can figure out how to stop using their software. It’s why there are dozens of open source Java distributions now and it’s why things like MariaDB exist.
Ok, but talk is cheap. If you want to know what people actually want, ignore what they say and pay attention to what they do. Oracle's revenue and net income have been pretty steady for at least the past 5 years. Unless they've found some major new revenue stream, it certainly doesn't look like their customers are leaving in droves.
Finding new revenue streams is exactly what Oracle has been doing.
Take just one example - Java. Created in 1995 by SunOS, officially made open source in 2006. Purchased by Oracle in 2009.
Demanded ludicrous runtime licensing fees in 2019.
Want another example? MySQL.
I know first hand of a handful of large cap companies completely shedding themselves of Oracle and have heard of many more that plan to.
Also, they purchase 3rd party applications at a regular basic to make sure new customers/hostages are always coming in the front door.
Hyperbole much? I guarantee there are plenty of companies doing giant transaction rates happily and stably on their big Oracle.
And plenty of ERP customers who are resigned to staying on their Oracle platform for the foreseeable future, even if only because the competitors are just as greedy shark as Oracle.
From time to time we start an initiative to do so (i.e., when there is a new set of executives at a certain level).
However, as the awareness of the actual scope and cost of migrating away becomes clear, the effort is dropped. It's technically possible, but also risky and no one wants to practically pause other development while it occurs -- which makes sense since that would probably be fatal.
Something comes along, that makes it feasible. It might be something surprising. And then, all of the sudden, there's no way to respond - because Oracle the company is so entrenched in the business model of profiting from locked-in customers, that they can't develop a novel response to a novel threat.
Companies partner with massive vendors like Oracle and jump through their hoops to remain in support contracts because it enables them to defer some liability and satisfy various regulatory checklists.
Think about a database instability scenario for an online retailer, and consider if you'd rather be the CTO who is to blame for self-hosting, or the CTO who can defer blame onward to the vendor. It's an unfortunate reality in many "enterprise" environments.
It's unlikely that even Oracle would pay to make someone whole after a data loss incident. But the reality is that the ability to blame Oracle or another black-box product from some vendor instead of your in-house instance of some open-source project (that no one outside of engineering has heard of) has real career-altering value to stakeholders. Maybe unjustified, but the effect exists nonetheless.
Self-hosting is certainly not the only choice nowadays, there are many other companies offering managed databases/other cloud products.
Oh, I hope you’re right, but am dubious. The F500 (and G500) is wedded to legacy systems, for good reasons, a marriage that even extends to new deployments.
PG is an Apple relative to the majority. His investments create waves in agency of others with or without their informed consent.
The antitrust bill Y com signed onto is to help get “web3” on devices.
True antitrust would be requiring unlocked OS agnostic hardware. We’ll have to settle for VC backed NFT market places, since that is who will flood App Store agnostic OS’s with options.
$BIG_VC has a new metaphor to sell. BOINC2.0!! I mean; web3! They’ll sign up to improve the status quo for them. No need to push for open devices; they’re fine with the OS monopoly.